Public Spatial Representation in consumer society: Conditions and Potentials of Auckland’s Malled Centre

Abstract

In the context of consumer society, the incremental privatisation of urban public spaces has become a widespread phenomenon. To analyse emerging forms of public space situated in a representative malled metropolitan centres, this thesis proposes a theoretical and methodological framework grounded on the recognition of the antagonism between two Lefebvrian spatialities: the abstract and the differential. On one hand, it studies abstract spaces produced through the conception and implementation of exogenous models that inhibit relationality and have little engagement with place-specific social, cultural and material elements. These spaces are set up with the knowledge and technology of spatial planning that structure space to enable comprehensive control and secure a dominant position of remote administrations in today's society. On the other, it examines differential counterspaces produced through everyday incremental acts of re-appropriation that re-establish placespecific differentiation processes. These counterspaces require participatory dynamics that often initiate from inner contradictions of the abstract space. An empirical investigation based on the theoretical study of the above two spatial representations was carried out on social media data. The research results indicate that in the contemporary city, the shopping mall creates semi-public spaces that are a specific form of abstract space in which the control of abstractive commercial expansions is intertwined with the alienation of everyday life. There exists a contradiction (physical, social, cognitive) between the highly introverted interior and gradually fragmented and de-reterritorialized exterior under the top-down control of remote administration, negating the selfhood and expanding the self-perception as a consumer. Meanwhile, the rise of digital communication assists the transformation of passive consumers into engaged of pro-active users (co-producers). The pervasion of the digital realm (VAM reality) within the physical one has created radical changes in people’s everyday practices, particularly in their relational life. In semi-public spaces, VAM reality has liberated relevant parts of users’ experience from the direct control of private organisations that manage these places. This re-appropriation enables citizens to reshape the space both socially and semantically, increasing their capacity of community building and cultural/symbolic production. The relevant evidence of user-generated content on locative social media shows how the spaces are being experienced, lived and reconfigured on and through the digital platform as well as reveals specific spatial conditions that can generate individual and collective memory. This acknowledgement assists in stepping out of the shadow of space dominated by power–the beginning of the existence of differential space. These findings have implications for conception, embodiment, implementation of privatelyowned public spaces and provide enlightenment for future exploration in the production of urban spaces.